India

Contrary to popular belief, cows don’t roam freely in Mumbai. Rather they are tied up on the side of road outside my apartment so that people on their way to work can feed them balls of rice or handfuls of grass purchased from the cows’ caretakers.

I’ve probably walked 100 times up the first story of the red staircase inside the Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai. It wasn’t until I was looking down that I realized how spectacular the building actually is from the inside.

There was an extended art project in a warehouse on the Sassoon fishing docks in Mumbai. The installations were pretty impressive. Two of my personal favourites are below. In the foreground, someone created a showroom for perfume scents from the docks – a lively fish smell. In the background on the walls, giant portraits of some of the women working in the dock area.

Just outside of our apartment complex in Mumbai is a stretch of sidewalk listed in Google maps as “Pigeon Feeding Area.” What they mean is “large cement pit, covered in excrement, overrun by by pigeons and rats.” Everything in the neighbourhood is covered in pigeon crap, except for the guy under the giant umbrella who sells feed to passerbys needing whatever little karma boost can be obtained from supporting the production of toxic poop.

Sarah asked me if I knew exactly how many mangos I ordered. I had forgotten the exact number, but I was aiming for a lot. I clearly succeeded.

For perspective, that bowl is about three feet in diameter.

One of my biggest disappointments of life in Mumbai was the day last year, shortly after our arrival, that I was informed that mango season was over and they wouldn’t be available for another ten months. I wasn’t about to let that happen again, so now we have a freezer full of mangos; a stockpile that will hopefully fill cravings through from August until next May.

As a dense city running the length of a narrow peninsula, Mumbai is known for its traffic congestion. Developers came up with the solution of building a highway out into the Arabian Sea and called it the Sea Link. Both these photos were taken around sunset on the same evening. The light was changing rapidly, leading to two completely different photos.